Pentecost falls on the Jewish festival of Shavuot, which the audience was in Jerusalem to observe, and the miracle reported is linguistic: everyone hears in their own language. Read against Babel, where language was confused to scatter humanity, the scene is a deliberate reversal — unity without uniformity, since the languages are not abolished but understood. That detail underwrote Christianity's pattern of translating its scriptures into vernaculars rather than fixing a sacred language, which is a real difference from its neighbors.